While working my way through Dr. Brinkley’s Tower, the fourth novel from Toronto’s Robert Hough, I kept getting that nagging feeling there was a reference being made that I couldn’t pin down. The cozy small-town setting, the travelling salesman hawking a life-changing construction project, the way the community rallies together in funny and unexpected ways — it all felt so familiar. What was Hough riffing on?

Then it came to me. The Simpsons. Season 4. “Marge vs. the Monorail.”

If it hasn’t already been grafted onto your DNA, this is the episode in which the town of Springfield is tricked into commissioning a massive elevated train system by a slippery con artist channelling his inner Music Man. The money changes hands. Homer is named operator. And then everything falls apart, starting with Marge’s discovery that a family of opossums are living in the cabinet of the cockpit where the fire extinguisher ought to be. Homer’s famous comeback: “I call the big one Bitey.”

“Marge vs. the Monorail” still stands as a high-water mark for the series 20-odd years later, and for good reason. Dr. Brinkley’s Tower may not share many of its surface details, and it may not be as funny (my goodness, what is?), but I maintain they are a kind of kindred spirit nonetheless. That big-heartedness, as well as the ability to vividly animate an entire town of people, are unmistakable. Of all the pop culture stars to steer by, knowingly or not, Hough has made a very canny pick.

Let’s back up a little. In 1931, a little Mexican border town called Corazón de la Fuente sits broken and ravaged by the aftermath of the revolution. Prospects are, if not exactly bleak, minimal. That all changes when a smooth-talking American entrepreneur named John Romulus Brinkley, “resplendent in a white summer-weight suit,” tortoise-shell glasses, and carrying a decorative walking stick “topped by a diamond the size of a walnut shell,” announces his grand plan. (And announces is the right word; Brinkley isn’t the type of guy who asks permission.)

He’s going to build a radio tower in Corazón de la Fuente, one that can broadcast all across the United States without being subject to those pesky regulations. For residents of the town, the project means jobs. Possibly prestige, too. Hough deftly cycles through a town’s worth of reactions, and nobody can come up with a good reason not to do it. Up it goes.

But all is not well once the tower gets built. For one thing, the radio signal starts transmitting through any nearby metal surface: weathervanes, ice cream scoops, barbed wire fences, even a girl’s newly installed braces. This is doubly irritating considering the only things Brinkley is interested in broadcasting are ads for his pseudoscientific impotence cure and endless loops of the hymn Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

The supposed prestige, too, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Hundreds of the even poorer and more destitute travel to Corazón in search of work that’s not there; they set up sprawling shantytowns at the tower’s base. Mostly it translates to an increased number of gringos coming across the bridge from Texas to spend their money at Madam Felix’s House of Gentlemanly Pleasures, all of whose girls are named Maria. Sometimes these men get so drunk they yell at the locals to go back to Mexico, forgetting which side of the border they’re standing on.

Hough has made a career specializing in fiction that’s thoroughly researched and possessed with a vibrant moral heartbeat. Dr. Brinkley’s Tower is so successful precisely because of how much attention is paid to its characters’ feelings and desires, no matter how slight. Hough’s Corazón de la Fuente is not a homogenous hive mind, but rather a noisy micro-democracy, where upwards of 20 figures each get a chance to make their case on the page. Looming over everyone and everything is Brinkley, a perpetual outsider who, despite his intentions, which may well have been at least partly good, still “had no idea what it was like to dress his children in coffee sacks with holes cut for the arms and huaraches fashioned from old bits of tire rubber.”

Hough’s greatest skill, however, is as an old-fashioned storyteller. Dr. Brinkley’s Tower moves like an extremely well-oiled machine, juggling and nudging forward all kinds of subplots without ever drawing attention to the muscularity required to do so. The scene where a town-wide brawl breaks out in the wake of a misguided guess-how-many-gumballs contest brings a smile to my face, still.

Not all novels need to put such a premium on storytelling, of course. But those that do would benefit from looking to Hough as an example of how to get the job done right.